Brian Eno Quotes
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One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
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I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
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I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.
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American television really is pathetic.
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If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
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Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
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If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
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I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
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The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.
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Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
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Painting, I think it's like jazz.
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I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
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I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
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I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.
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When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
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When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
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The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
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In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it.
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The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.